We sat and watched the traffic and I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me… -- Narrator
(One)

Importance: When the novel begins, the narrator and his literary agent have just finished lunch. They sit down at Tenth Street to watch the traffic, where a sense of surreality sets in by way of the narrator. He explains that everything seemed the same, but somehow felt different, as if something had changed ever so slightly. This will be incredibly important as the novel progresses, for changes of all kinds are coming to the writer’s life.